“Amish” and “baseball” – Before now, I would bet you never heard those two words used together.

The Amish are odd, mysterious, secretive, separatists who live with no electricity and shun all contact with the outside world. That is the perception. In reality, the difference is in degrees, depending upon which of the 1,850 Amish communities you are describing.

I wrote this story to dispel some of the myths.

The Amish might seem odd to many people because not much is known about them. The Amish are said to be “against change” and the evidence given is “they don’t use electricity.” These are some of the misunderstandings. The Amish do change, but the rate of that change is much slower than the rest of the world. Depending on the community, that change might be in the acceptance of electricity. Produce you buy at an Amish roadside stand might be tallied on an electronic calculator and the day’s totals entered into a computer. The odds are that computer is not yet connected to the Internet. Change takes place over a longer time arc in the Amish community.

I think the Amish might feel right at home playing the “timeless” game of baseball.